=The external evidence.= Those who expect to find a demonstration of the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel in the external evidences, will be disappointed. The literature of the first three centuries does not afford a demonstration of authorship of any ancient book. But the authorship of John’s Gospel I believe to be as well established, on a fair consideration of all the evidence, external and internal, as that of any work of the same era. It is not questioned by any one that at the beginning of the third century the Fourth Gospel was in general use in the churches, and universally recognized as written by the Apostle John. Eusebius, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, are among those who bear testimony to this fact. The Fourth Gospel is recognized as John’s composition in the canon of Muratori, A. D. 175; and by Irenæus, who died about 202, and who was a pupil of Polycarp, himself a pupil of John. References to sayings of Jesus reported only by John are also found in the writings of Tatian, A. D. 170, Justin Martyr, A. D. 120-160, and the various Gnostic writers of the second century. These references do not conclusively prove the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel, for these earliest writers are not accustomed to give the names of authors from whom they quote; but they do conclusively prove that as early as the first part of the second century, sayings of Christ, found only in the Fourth Gospel, were attributed by the Church to Jesus. The best report of these quotations which I have seen is to be found in the second volume of “Supernatural Religion,” and they are there the more effective because the author in vain endeavors to break their force, by what most readers will consider an ingenious but ineffective special pleading. Let the reader compare these quotations with the parallel passages in the Fourth Gospel; he will not doubt that the later writers borrowed from the earlier one. The only alternative is the irrational hypothesis that both borrowed from the same source and one generally recognized in the primitive Church; in other words, that there was a Gospel containing the same matter that is now found in the Fourth Gospel, but that it has so entirely disappeared that no tradition even of its existence has survived, and that in its place a forgery has been palmed off upon the Church so successfully, that in the beginning of the third century it was universally accepted as the original work of the Apostle whose name it has ever since borne.